INTRODUCTION

In 2003, I first went to Patmos, a Greek island that I fell in love with and now return to every year. The way I get to know a place is to take portraits of the people who live there. Fifteen years ago, I asked Jacqueline Délia Brémond, a beautiful French woman who had been coming to Patmos for thirty­ five years, if I could photograph her. She had just turned seventy, and while I was taking her portrait, I asked her what it felt like to be seventy. I found myself listening attentively, not in the abstract way I usually do when talking to a subject while really focusing on the composition of the picture. I had been thinking about aging, myself. “This is what I want to know,” I thought. What does it feel like to be seventy, eighty, or one hundred years old? How will I feel when I lose my looks or my ability to be independent, to travel alone to remote parts of the world? What is it like to know that the end of life is approaching? And that was the birth of The Second Half.
 
I’ve spent my career taking pictures. Interviewing was new to me. I had to decide what questions to ask. What did I really want to know? I narrowed my questions to the following: After several interviews, I decided that the reader needed to know more about the women. What kind of family were they born into? What had their childhood been like? So I began to start each interview by asking the woman to tell me her life story, starting from the beginning.
 
People often ask me how I found the women in the book. The answer is: usually through other women. Shortly after that trip to Patmos, my husband and I were invited to visit friends in Paris. I was chatting with our next­-door neighbor across our garden wall, won­dering how I would find women. “You must photograph the woman who was married to my husband’s uncle!” my friend said. That was Odette Walling. Our hosts in Paris recommended a few women, and Jacqueline Délia recommended others. On another trip, walking down a little street in village of Ubud in Bali, I saw a beautiful woman. “Who is she?” I asked my companion. “She’s my Auntie,” was the response. That was Ni Ketut Takil. (I was later told that in local vil­lages, it’s customary to call every older woman an Auntie.) In south­ern Algeria, I was crossing the desert with five friends to visit the prehistoric paintings of the Tassili. I asked our Berber guides if they could keep their eyes open for a nomadic woman—which is how I met Fatma Doufen.
 
In general, I had two criteria for the women I photographed and interviewed. They had to be interesting looking—not necessarily beautiful, but interesting looking. And they had to be willing to open up and be honest in the interview. And, with a couple of exceptions, I didn’t want to photograph friends—I wanted to approach each per­son with fresh eyes and ears. I looked for diversity, both geographic and socioeconomic, within the limits of how much of the world I could cover.
 
When the women couldn’t speak English, they had friends—and, in one case, a granddaughter—translate. I asked very personal ques­tions during each interview, and I wondered if the granddaughter learned intimate things about her grandmother that she might never have known.
 
While everyone told me her age at the time of our interview, I’ve used “circa” (abbreviated as “ca.”) when I don’t know for certain the specific year when someone was born. Some interviews were very long, and then I had to edit a great deal—an agonizing process, as I found everything about each woman’s life story compelling. Each woman has taught me something. I’ve learned about run­ning a pub in London, arranged marriages in Saudi Arabia, shoeing racehorses, raising a son to become a world­ famous cellist, and much, much more.
 
The women have been inspirational. I will never forget the cour­age of Jean Angell, who could move only her eyeballs and depended on others for care. Her ability to adapt and still lead a vibrant life—attending ballet performances and art exhibits, using her legal mind to help her wide circle of friends and family—made me forget she had a disability. Or Lali Al Balushi, whose husband divorced her in Oman and moved with her three small children, the youngest two months old, to Pakistan. Now, small annoyances aren’t so important to me.
 
Because this project took fifteen years to complete, circum­stances for some of the women in the book have changed since they were interviewed. Tamasin Day-­Lewis, whom I interviewed early in the project shortly after she was divorced, is now happily remarried. And a few of the women, including Olivia de Havilland, have died. Each woman’s interview and photograph is a moment in time, how they felt then, as honestly as they could relate it. Their lives span a century, and their attitudes express their time and culture.

One of the things I found interesting is that the nomad in the Sahara and the cook in South Carolina often come to the same conclusion as the Marquesa in Seville. There is a definite consensus, which was surprising to me at first, that the second half is better than the first. “This sounds like turning lemons into lemonade,” said an American friend of mine in her forties, but I found it voiced with real conviction. In the second half, you know who you are, and you are liberated by not caring about what others think of you. In the second half, wisdom kicks in, intuition takes over, and you can accept your­self, flaws and all, with greater ease and clarity. That very positive message became the underlying theme of The Second Half.
 
I would like to express my gratitude to the women in the book, who have taken the time to be included and in many cases have reflected upon unpleasant memories. I trust their stories will be as helpful to readers, as they ponder difficult decisions or moments in their own lives, as they have been to me.